This groundbreaking study traces the development of Roman architecture and its sculpture from the earliest days to the middle of the 5th century BCE. Existing narratives cast the Greeks as the progenitors of classical art and architecture or rely on historical sources dating centuries after the fact to establish the Roman context. Author John North Hopkins, however, allows the material and visual record to play the primary role in telling the story of Rome’s origins, synthesizing important new evidence from recent excavations. Hopkins’s detailed account of urban growth and artistic, political, and social exchange establishes strong parallels with communities across the Mediterranean. From the late 7th century, Romans looked to increasingly distant lands for shifts in artistic production. By the end of the archaic period they were building temples that would outstrip the monumentality of even those on the Greek mainland. The book’s extensive illustrations feature new reconstructions, allowing readers a rare visual exploration of this fragmentary evidence.

This book offers the first-ever survey of artistic depictions of the legend of Saint George defeating the dragon. The earliest existing references to this episode in the hagiography of Saint George date from the 11th century, and the mythical conflict has entertained the imaginations of artists ever since. Copiously illustrated, this book includes varied representations in painting, sculpture, engraving, and more by artists from Raphael and Peter Paul Rubens to Odilon Redon and Andy Warhol. In addition, the artists David Claerbout, Giuseppe Penone, Luc Tuymans, and Angel Vergara Santiago have been invited to contribute their own interpretations of the story, and these new works are also featured. The contemporary perspective is further explored in the book through essays that trace the shifting resonance of the allegory, positing that it has evolved to become symbolic of man’s internal struggle as he attempts to fulfill his destiny.

Definitive in its scholarship and thrilling in its scope, this lavishly illustrated volume offers the first book-length study of Luca Signorelli, sometimes described as the least-known major artist of the Renaissance. Twenty years of painstaking archival research have produced this portrait of Signorelli in public and private life.

For more than a millennium the Byzantine Empire presided over the juncture between East and West, as well as the transition from the classical to the modern world. Jonathan Harris, a leading scholar of Byzantium, eschews the usual run-through of emperors and battles and instead recounts the empire's extraordinary history by focusing each chronological chapter on an archetypal figure, family, place or event. Harris’s action-packed introduction presents a civilization rich in contrasts, combining orthodox Christianity with paganism, and classical Greek learning with Roman power. Frequently assailed by numerous armies—including those of Islam—Byzantium nonetheless survived and even flourished by dint of its somewhat unorthodox foreign policy and its sumptuous art and architecture, which helped to embed a deep sense of Byzantine identity in its people.Enormously engaging and utilizing a wealth of sources to cover all major aspects of the empire’s social, political, military, religious, cultural, and artistic history, Harris’s study illuminates the very heart of Byzantine civilization and explores its remarkable and lasting influence on its neighbors and on the modern world.

This beautiful book surveys the sculpture of many civilizations—from ancient Egypt, Greece, and China to fifteenth-century Italy, nineteenth-century France, and twentieth-century North America. It provides a basic introduction to the nature of the materials used by sculptors, examining how these were regarded as well as how they were worked in different periods and in different cultures.The book begins with the hardest stones that are worked with abrasives, goes on to discuss marble and softer stones and organic materials, such as wood and ivory, considers plastic materials (clay, stucco, gesso, and wax), both as molded materials and modeled ones, and then describes the casting and tooling of metal. Each chapter defines the limitations and challenges special to the material, examining, for example, its availability, value, durability, versatility, size, and color. Considering the ways in which artists have transferred techniques from one medium to another and striven to imitate in one material effects associated with another—how, for example, ivory carving has influenced porcelain models and pieced wooden sculpture has influenced marble carving—Nicholas Penny questions and qualifies the most powerful idea in the education of the sculptor in this century—the relation of truth to material.Full of facts drawn from rare and obscure publications and taking account of newer research (some carried out at the author's own request), the book combines useful information with stimulating speculation. It will be welcomed by sculpture lovers everywhere and provides an essential guide for students.

Hand-painted illumination enlivened the burgeoning culture of the book in the Italian Renaissance, spanning the momentous shift from manuscript production to print. This major survey, by a leading authority on medieval and renaissance book illumination, gives the first comprehensive account in English of an immensely creative and relatively little-studied art form.Jonathan J. G. Alexander describes key illuminated manuscripts and printed books from the period and explores the social and material worlds in which they were produced. Renaissance humanism encouraged wealthy members of the laity to join the clergy as readers and book collectors. Illuminators responded to patrons’ developing interest in classical motifs, and celebrated artists such as Mantegna and Perugino occasionally worked as illuminators. Italian illuminated books found patronage across Europe, their dispersion hastened by the French invasion of Italy at the end of the 15th century. Richly illustrated, The Painted Book in Renaissance Italy is essential reading for all scholars and students of Renaissance art.

Famous for their new treatment of heroic, antique subjects and the depiction of the male nude in action, Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo ran one of the most successful and advanced workshops in fifteenth-century Florence. This comprehensive and beautifully illustrated book reexamines the brothers’ careers and multifaceted work to present a fresh understanding of their contributions to the development of Italian art. Art historian Alison Wright draws on new evidence to reassess the Pollaiuolo brothers’ activities as painters, sculptors, and designers and to set their work in the context of the changing social, political, and cultural life of both Florence and Rome. She considers Antonio’s and Piero’s innovations as well as their self-conscious development of distinct products in precious or novel media. The book provides the definitive account of the Pollaiuolo brothers and their practices, a comprehensive list of their works (including some newly attributed), and a fully updated chronology.

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, photography, film, and posters played an essential role in the campaign to disseminate modernity and Communist ideology. From early experimental works by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky to the modernist photojournalism of Arkady Shaikhet and Max Penson, Soviet photographers were not only in the vanguard of style and technological innovation but also radical in their integration of art and politics. Filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Esfir Shub pioneered cinematic techniques for works intended to mobilize viewers. Covering the period from the Revolution to the beginning of World War II, The Power of Pictures considers Soviet avant-garde photography and film in the context of political history and culture. Three essays trace this generation of artists, their experiments with new media, and their pursuit of a new political order. A wealth of stunning photographs, film stills, and film posters, as well as magazine and book designs, demonstrate that their output encompassed a spectacular range of style, content, and perspective, and an extraordinary sense of the power of the photograph to change the world.

In the words of cultural historian Jacob Burkhardt, fifteenth-century Italy was "the place where the notion of the individual was born." In keeping with that idea, early Renaissance Italy was a key participant in the first great age of portraiture in Europe. As groundbreaking artists strove to evoke the identity or personality of their sitters—from heads of state and church, military commanders, and wealthy patrons to scholars, poets, and artists—they evolved daring new representational strategies that would profoundly influence the course of Western art. More than a mere likeness, the fifteenth-century Italian portrait was an attempt to wrest from the unpredictability of life and the shadow of mortality and image that could be passed down to future generations. The Renaissance Portrait, which accompanies a landmark exhibition at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, provides new research and insight into the early history of portraiture in Italy, examining in detail how its major art centers—Florence, the princely courts, and Venice—saw the rapid development of portraiture as closely linked to Renaissance society and politics, ideas of the individual, and concepts of beauty. Essays by leading scholars provide a thorough introduction to Renaissance portraiture, while individual catalogue entries illustrate and extensively discuss more than 160 magnificent examples of painting, drawing, manuscript illumination, sculpture, and medallic portraiture by such artists as Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, and Giovanni Bellini. With abundant style and visual ingenuity, these masters transformed the plain facts of observation into something beautiful to behold.

Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570) was the leading sculptor and architect of sixteenth-century Venice. His position and abilities enabled him to reshape Venetian sculpture, and his influence remained dominant long after his death. This beautiful book by Bruce Boucher is the first study of Sansovino’s sculpture in over fifty years and the first ever to present a catalogue raisonne of his works. Boucher begins by discussing Sansovino’s career chronologically and thematically. He describes how the sculptor was trained in his native Florence and in Rome, how he established himself as a serious rival to Michelangelo, and how the Sack of Rome in 1527 forced him to flee to Venice where he enjoyed a second, even more successful career. In Venice, says Boucher, Sansovino was taken up by a small band of influential patrons, became architect of the Doge’s chapel, and received important commissions from both the state and individuals. Boucher discusses in detail commissions such as the Loggetta and the colossal Mars and Neptune for the Doge’s Palace, critically assesses Sansovino’s artistic style, analyzes the relationship between Sansovino’s sculpture and sixteenth-century paintings, describes Sansovino’s workshop and the division of labor in his major commissions, and explores Sansovino’s influence during his life and after his death. The text and catalogue raisonne are complemented by an appendix of documents, some of which have never been published before, that add greatly to our knowledge of the sculptor in his social and artistic context. The resulting book is a superb visual and analytical record of the work and career of one of the greatest sculptors of the High Renaissance.

The Wittgenstein Vitrine, a monumental silver and gemstone-encrusted cabinet, is one of the most important and complex works produced by Austria’s Wiener Werkstätte. Kevin W. Tucker weaves together a fascinating portrait of the vitrine, examining its stylistic origins and context, the powerful Wittgenstein family, and Vienna during its apogee of artistic ferment. His essay explores how the vitrine and its presentation at the 1908 Kunstschau embodied the debate over progressive ornamentation and suggested the evolving definition of modernity in the early 20th century. A companion essay by Fran Baas details the fascinating eight-month process of conserving the cabinet, revealing construction details unseen since its original assembly. Lavish photography throughout the book includes details of the vitrine’s floral and faunal ornamentation as well as contextual images of related works by the Wiener Werkstätte. This book also serves as the only English-language publication detailing the work and biography of the vitrine’s designer, Carl Otto Czeschka (1878–1960).

The book is a novel and compelling account of how illuminated vernacular manuscripts transformed conceptions of Christian excellence in the later Middle Ages. The author examines how manuscript paintings collaborated and, at times, competed with texts as they translated the rudiments of Christian belief as well as complex theological teachings to new audiences on both sides of the English Channel.